


Happy Endings

by whateverliesunsaid



Category: Legion (TV)
Genre: F/M, and it ends as it begins, in which sydney and david fall in and out of love many times over
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-12 00:51:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20555510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whateverliesunsaid/pseuds/whateverliesunsaid
Summary: THE UNIVERSE IS A TREE; THOSE ARE SYD AND DAVID’S BRANCHES.





	Happy Endings

David and Syd meet.

What happens next?

If you want a happy ending, try **A**.

##  **A.**

David and Syd fall in love at a psychiatric facility. It’s at first sight, of course, as all great loves ought to be. He sees her and the world stops for a second, as does his breathing, as does his heartbeat. Everything skips, everything shifts. She wanders into the room and gravity changes almost instantly, she doesn’t know yet: but she’s at the heart of his universe.

Some things, of course, are meant to be.

This fairy tale has a catch, though. The boy cannot touch the girl and so they make do. They play with shadows and lights, they let their hands linger ever so close, ever so dangerously— and _they love each other_. Even when she’s discharged and he’s kept in, when he rushes in and kisses her desperately, as though that’s his last opportunity—

Even when she feels the world through his touch for the very first time, communes with his devils and comes out killing— Even then, they search for each other repeatedly. At the very last second, they meet. Her fire provides him rebirth by water (this, my love, is your baptism!) and he comes out holy and pure.

_They are not sick, they’re free!_ She holds out her hand to him, they are together at last but eventually they die at the hands of division 3. She does not get to figure out why the blonde girl with the orange shades and the gun who shoots him in the back and her by proxy looks so familiar. **This is the end of this story.**

##  **B.**

They meet as in A but when time comes, they don’t die.

In fact, they find new home in Summerland, a mutant new haven, where they’re allowed to explore their powers, to live free of their medications— of their shame. And they talk freely for the first time.

They ask the big questions, they share their first moments of physicality, so to speak. He takes her to the white room where everybody gets what they want and when they kiss, their wake is _bright, bright, bright!_

They find out what’s the matter with his thoughts, who’s been haunting him all this time and give him a name, an origin. All monsters must be known if they’re to be destroyed and this one called himself a king.

All paths lead to the desert, this land of prophetic divination where the heroes finally find the thread that unites their stories. The past and the future converge into one in the land of no horizon, here where all circles are as flat as time, a confined ouroboros. Where the signals become too common place, too confusing to understand, all language falls undone. They lie in the tent where their bones are exposed, where lies are not allowed in and they wait for the morning light to guide their path once more.

God loves sinners best but Sydney and David are more straightforward than that; so he sets out to kill the king and his minion and she walks the peregrination of prophets to kill two monsters alike. One who meant to end her; another who was to end the world.

He wipes the sweat off her forehead and the memories within with one swift move, a begging for forgiveness she cannot abide. Later that night, the man she loved, David, dies. She takes him to court with his enemy who’s also her own. In many ways she, too, dies that night.

##  **C.**

She shoots him four times that day, he never gets to see her face.

He dies.

Except he doesn’t.

* * *

Sydney meets David in the wake of his commune.

He shows up apologetically, almost sheepish and she holds herself cold and distant, her heart too tired of being beaten into submission to choose kindness when truth is also at hand. _It eats at her until her anger, her deeply human anguish spills over her tight grip, slipping out of her control through the force with which she says the words._ They hurt to say out loud, scratching her throat on the way up, but it must be said. _Do you ever see me?_

As usual, they fight. Love won and love lost is love poisoned for all it’s worth, for all that separates their first meeting to now. Her hand rises to where her headband pushed against her head prior, that thick crown of thorns, her head filled with images she didn’t ever see. They argue, they fight. The tears are almost as clear as their hurt, as their want not to be hurt any longer. _Let us turn back time, baby_ (it does not change who we are, so let us be pretenders once more.)

* * *

She hijacks his body with a touch that is always, always new. Taking on his consciousness and dragging her own weight under new touch towards the door, up and away where they can keep him safe, keep him down until they figure it all out. They, the good guys (_if those really, actually exist_ — she has her doubts.)

He, ever the opponent, fights back and presses her down like a disease. Every cell battling her down, screaming and shouting into the land of forgetfulness where she may never wake from her slumber.

She’s dead and he apologizes (again). He’ll undo it, he promises (again). It all reeks of deja vu, but she’s nowhere to see it and he’s alone with his hands, his actions and his demons.

(20 minutes later, she rises once more with an intent to fix it all on her own.)

##  **D.**

David and Syd meet gazes, but only fleetingly.

As David fishes something out of the trashcan, searching for dinner or an useful thing of any sort. These days thoughts come and go like waves, reason gone as far as a ship can go without falling off the edge of the planet into the abyss of the stars. Beyond the horizon of his perception, however, is where the people with what they call ‘sane minds’ dwell. It’s where his sister lives now— but he forgot she even exists. These days he lives alone with the voices in his head.

A car passes by, dark and sleek, something out of the propaganda he sees on bus stops these days and a girl with eyes like sapphires sees him, but only for a second. There’s recognition in her eyes but it’s only a lapse, it’s only a moment and it’s fleeting enough he doesn’t notice it. Sydney taps button and the tinted window rises.

He carries on with his search and dies later that night to the cold. Before he’s fully gone, he finds himself in a place where the forgotten things go and a little girl who knows him, but not _him_, tells him it’s going to be okay. She takes him somewhere nice and warm before she leaves, ready to find her own family, finally having answers to some of the questions she carried since birth. _You can’t save people who aren’t ready, or willing, to be saved. But you have to try._

She does it more times than she can count, runs into herself more than once, threatens the universe and meets gods aplenty. She stops the apocalypse and doesn’t as well, it’s a lottery. Eventually, she goes back home.

It ends as in A, which is to say:_ they die_.

##  **E.**

**_When time comes: prove me wrong_**, a woman much like her begs a man who is eerily like him; in fact, it is written down that they should be. For him she falls like Alice, through trapdoors that lead nowhere but further down to the core of their lives. Grasping at read threads, trying to halt the motion and nothing stops the weaving of their tapestries, for all this tugging and nudging that led them to one another, in every other life it seemed to push them further and further away, the red line growing thin.

When Sydney meets David, a taste of finality seeps through her tongue, past her lips, through her words, a spit full of snark. It’s brand new, really. When they come to it, they’re different people, and not the kind who are able to love one another. And it’s done for, like a book you read too fast and find yourself hanging at the edge of the last chapter (our hubris will be the end of us,)

_My love, we deserve a softer epilogue. We have suffered enough, haven’t we?_

But the universe is careless, though it sees us with watchful eyes, and it claims it sees value in our love. Not all is lost in our odyssey. _It can’t be, it can’t be_. The goddess of Time is kind, at least, thoughtful. _You’ll be wonderful, Sydney_. Except she won’t be Sydney, and he won’t be David. And at the very last second, she can’t figure out what can possibly be so wonderful about that. Tears slide down her cheeks, carrying her eyeliner a track of black tainting what once was purely blank.

Their world ends, spread around like veins keeping a whole universe alive they’re thrown out of existence as swiftly as they came into being, with a flash of light, under the merciful care of Time, they <strike>fearlessly</strike> die.

##  **F.**

You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it.

Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.

The only authentic ending is the one provided here: David and Syd die. David and Syd die. David and Syd die.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun.

True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with.

That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.

Now try How and Why.


End file.
